Prof Myles Lavan

Prof Myles Lavan

Director of Research

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2610
Email
mpl2@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
C22
Location
Craigard

 

Biography

My first degree was a BA in Classics from Trinity College Dublin (1995-9). I then went astray for five years – studying international politics and economics at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service (1999-2001) and working as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co (2001-4) – before eventually seeing the error of my ways. I returned to Classics and completed an MPhil and PhD at Cambridge (2004-8). I was a Research Fellow at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (2008-10) and came to St Andrews in September 2010. I am currently the Editor of the Journal of Roman Studies.

Teaching

  • My Honours modules include Ancient Empires, The Culture of Roman Imperialism, Roman Slavery and Death in Roman Culture. I also contribute to Honours Latin modules on Latin Letters and Latin Historical Writing. 
  • I also teach across the team-taught sub-Honours programmes in Ancient History and Latin Literature.

Research areas

My current focus is a new study of manumission in the Roman world and the Americas. I have come to believe that two problems have hampered our understanding of manumission in the Roman world, and in other societies with relatively high levels of manumission. The first is the lack of a demography of manumission, though manumission is obviously a demographic process, like mortality or marriage. It is as if we were still debating mortality patterns without the analytical apparatus of demography, such as the concept of Life Expectancy or the framework of the Life Table. The second problem lies in the narratives that shape how we think about manumission. It is still all too easy to fall into the trap of internalising the slave-owners’ conception of manumission as a gift – a unilateral act of generosity that redounds to the credit of an individual and, by extension, a society. If claims about manumission are not to be repeatedly harnessed to apologist projects, we need to find a better way of acknowledging the wide variation in the scale of manumission, recognising that there were some contexts where the majority of enslaved people could hope to be freed if they lived long enough, and integrating this into our understanding of slavery. I am now nearly finished a monograph that develops a demographic framework for studying manumission; presents new studies of the scale of manumission in the US, the British Caribbean and Brazil; and then revisits the evidence for Rome, Roman Italy and the provinces, especially Egypt. The inversion of chronology is deliberate. It is only after acquiring an analytical framework that can make sense of the evidence from the better-documented Americas that ancient historians can hope to interpret the even more parlous evidence from antiquity.

 Research interests

  • Political, social and cultural history of the Roman empire
  • Roman citizenship
  • Slavery and manumission
  • Ideology and language of empire
  • Quantitative methods in ancient history
  • Comparative history of ancient empires

Research students

I would be very happy to supervise research projects in any of these areas. I have supervised PhD dissertations on:

  • The role of the peculium in Roman slavery
  • Revolt and mutiny narratives in Roman historiography
  • Roman law in Tacitus
  • The imperial salutatio
  • Modelling the distribution of wealth in the Roman empire
  • The significance of civitates in the Roman West
  • Images of foreign peoples and place in Roman art
  • Writing the lives of Roman emperors
  • Roman land division
  • Actor Network Theory approaches to Early Roman Iberia
  • The Triumviral aristocracy

PhD supervision

  • Connor Hickey
  • Sarah Prince
  • Reise Watson
  • Jana Mauri Marlborough
  • Kiara De Vore

Selected publications

 

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